You're reading a post titled “Mostly by accident.” from the archives of
Big Contrarian. It was originally published on July 23rd, 2012 at 12:39 PM. If you enjoy it, you should subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, or its Twitter page.

Yahoo reaches more than 75 percent of the total Internet audience in the United States, with 167.2 million unique users in June. On any given day, 30 million or more people stop by. Globally, about 700 million people visit the site in 30 languages every month.

It can be argued that Yahoo is burning out, but slowly, and has been for awhile. It can be argued that while they maintain a large presence of content, they lack any type of moat, or niche, to protect that presence; that any upstart could unseat them from any category provided the right momentum. They are a shrinking giant.

I’d argue that Yahoo is simply a very boring company, with a very simple business model. What Yahoo lacks is a shiny bobble with which the technology press can attach their collective fixation.